Might not be realistic but An idea is real time ticks, baisicly multiple small intermidiate tick updates that update every min, this used for Units, buildings and fleets. So if u build figs at 14:34 they Will finish f.eks 17:34. People never building om same “ticks” shouldnt that ease the stress on servers?
This would in theory open up new stategic options and make science build alot harder and make IT easier for the less active to keep up.
That will be somewhat possible when we Split the Tick on a single server. We did that before with 1-minute ticks, but it does introduce a whole new set of challenges.
It’s not a bad thing at all, but it isn’t a solution to the root issue either. Even if we were to do that, we’d still want to optimize the actual tick itself.
what i ment was, u would still have the 1 tick = 1h aspect… but with multiple updates during that 1 tick/hour. Ergo… figs would still take 3-4 hours to build. but if u started them at 14:34 they would finish at 17:34… the speed of how the game is played wouldnt change… like it did with hyper and 1min ticks.
Ah, I see. That is an interesting idea. 
Gonna move this to #roadmap:brainstorming, would like to explore it more.
if implemented right, i guess that could take some heat of the servers seeing the work load would be spread out… or i might be wrong 
This would also take away some of the exploit strategies we use today as science builds… where empire size penalty and science is “exploitet” becouse the tick alows us to do it. The sub ticks would make that alot harder, and make the semi active more competative as the super active would need to build without science builds etc.
also it would open up new strategies, you could have figs come in 1 min after the other etc… and you could time fleet arrivals and get more efficient use out of your fleet since all 3 tick fleets wouldnt arrive at the same time anymore…
Upcoming tick-splitting work is going to make something like this viable.
It could end up being a (relatively) simple enough thing to implement after the tick is split: if a round runs on 1-minute ticks, you could just translate the current time costs in hours into ticks in minutes. For example:
Soldiers
Regular game: 2 hours to build at 1 tick per hour (cost = 2 ticks)
Fast game: 2 minutes to build at 1 tick per minute (cost = 2 ticks)
“Staggered” game: 2 hours at 1 tick per minute (cost = 120 ticks)
So you end up with a pseudo-realtime version of the game that paces similarly to a regular round, but with units, buildings, traveltimes, etc… all that stuff happening throughout the hour instead of just on the hour.
It might not be everybody’s preference, but it could be the kind of thing we offer as an option, especially for player-created galaxies.